Well, I searched my memory, and as I recall, I thought FLETCH was abominably bad back in the day. I suspect its badness has not been altered by the passage of time.

Also in Slate…On Monica Goodling’s testimony: “Look past Goodling's long, silky blond hair, which may or may not have been a distraction. She's entitled to have pretty hair. Look past her trembling hand as she swore her oath and the tremulous voice as she described her ‘family’ at Justice. What really shot Goodling into the stratosphere of baby-doll girls were her own whispered words: ‘At heart,’ she testified, ‘I am a fairly quiet girl, who tries to do the right thing and tries to treat people kindly along the way.’ The idea, of course, was to scrub away her past image as ruthless, power-mad, and zealously Christian. But—as professor Sandy Levinson noted almost immediately over at Balkinization—it was in calling herself a ‘girl’ that the 33-year-old did herself a great favor. It was a signal to the committee that she was no Kyle Sampson. Or Anita Hill.”…“The first thing we noticed on Thursday (didn't everybody?) was Goodling's hair—great highlights! But to even say that is to trivialize her, right? And for us to say it, as women, is to launch a catfight. It's to separate her from the big boys, by calling her a girl.”

The gist of the article was that Goodling succeeded in creating a good impression by acting all girly, when she’s actually more sharky.

Of course, the authors themselves (Emily Bazelon and Dahlia Lithwick) spent more time discussing her personal appearance, rather than whether she was dissembling or not.

Meanwhile, speaking of personal appearance….Here’s Maureen Dowd! “It’s no wonder Al Gore is a little touchy about his weight, what with everyone trying to read his fat cells like tea leaves to see if he’s going to run. He was so determined to make his new book look weighty, in the this-treatise-belongs-on-the-shelf-between-Plato-and-Cato sense, rather than the double-chin-isn’t-quite-gone-yet sense, that he did something practically unheard of for a politician: He didn’t plaster his picture on the front.”

Again, Ms Dowd gets to chastize “everyone” for lingering on Mr. Gore’s fatness, while herself pointing out that he is fat.

More thinness:The Daily Mail: “In the race for ever thinner displays for TVs, cell phones and other gadgets, Sony may have developed one to beat them all - a razor-thin display that bends like paper while showing full-colour video.”

Why?

"’In the future, it could get wrapped around a lamppost or a person's wrist, even worn as clothing,’ said Sony spokesman Chisato Kitsukawa. ‘Perhaps it can be put up like wallpaper.’”

Why would you want to wear a television screen? So other people can watch C-SPAN on your chest?

For the ladies….This week the Food and Drug Administration approved Lybrel, the first birth-control pill explicitly designed to abolish monthly bleeding.

This whole Gonzalez thing.I loved the image of Alberto Gonzalez rushing into Ashcroft’s hospital room, to get the semi-comatose then-Attorney General to sign off on the administration’s domestic surveillance program. Ashcroft was so against it, that he, the head of the FBI, and acting Attorney General James Comey were ready to resign. It’s pretty dramatic stuff, but makes me wonder what the hell was in that program? Ashcroft wasn’t exactly a liberal.